It is good to see the Little Angel opening its doors to adult audiences, and nice to welcome back the Ding Foundation, who, along with companies such as Faulty Optic and Blind Summit, are part of a growing strand of British theatre that recognises puppets can sometimes connect with audiences more directly than human performers. As Peter Schuman of Bread and Puppet Theatre once declared: "Puppets are not cute, like Muppets. Puppets are effigies and gods and meaningful people."

Inspired in part by Tove Jansson's book about a grandmother and granddaughter living alone on a Finnish island, the Ding Foundation's Hanging By a Thread offers a huge bed as a stage through which trees and flowers sprout and the bedclothes themselves seem to breathe. Here, Grandma sits knitting as her granddaughter tends to her, in a strange, almost hallucinatory (and possibly drug-induced) world where memory and fantasy, the grandmother's past and her granddaughter's future, seem to blur. Death for one will mean a new life for the other, in an endlessly repeating natural cycle.

There are lovely moments in this wordless piece neatly underscored with sound and music. The curious hybrid of puppet and human (flesh-and-blood legs with puppet torso) is very effective. But though the show is good at creating mood, it is hopeless at telling a story, which makes it remote and frustrating to watch. With considerable restructuring and more attention to clarity, this could yet be a great little show. In its current form it feels very much like a yarn that has not yet knitted fully.